Ebony and Ivy (6 page)

The distant threats to the English lay in New France, New Netherland, and New Spain, but Indians presented a more pressing concern. Colonists sought the best European military technologies and adopted ruthless forms of warfare. They imported matchlock and flintlock guns to terrorize their enemies. In May 1637, at the culmination of Connecticut's Pequot War, the English surrounded a village on the Mystic River, opened fire, set the buildings ablaze, and then butchered five hundred people as they tried to escape the flames. Captain John Underhill celebrated: “Downe fell men, women, and children.”
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The war left an inventory of Christian militarization. Captain John Mason of Connecticut carried a thirty-two-inch double-edged sword inscribed VENI VIDI VICI. Dazzled by the synchronization of the guns, Captain Underhill had a spiritual moment in battle, feeling “as though the finger of God had touched both match and flint” to destroy the Indians “without compassion.” Sergeant William
Hayden, in Mason's force, brought a cutlass made for slashing in close combat and similar to those that many New England men used to train. John Thomson of Plymouth had a flintlock and a cutlass. “Having our swords in our right hand, our Carbin[e]s or Muskets in our left hand, we approached the Fort” to finish off the survivors, Underhill recalled. Cruder weapons could be made in the colonies, but Miles Standish brandished a rapier, a well-crafted European thrusting sword that required more training and skill to wield. The English burned the Pequot food supplies and took their blades to hundreds of young Indian men who put down their arms, attempted to surrender, or sought refuge with other tribes.
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The attack publicized the power of the Christian God to the benefit of New England and its college. Friends and leaders of the college participated in the war, and Harvard acquired about two thousand acres of land after the English divided up the Pequot holdings in southeastern Connecticut. Israel Stoughton led Massachusetts's forces against the Pequot and delivered about 250 captives for enslavement.
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Wondrous tales of red savages brought to Christ by the dauntless efforts of religious perfectionists found an eager audience in England, where metropolitan readers anticipated blood from such extraordinary encounters. The Puritans began the work of evangelizing Indians only after they achieved military supremacy—in the aftermath of the destruction of the Pequot and a long campaign to reduce the power of the Narragansett. Eliot established the praying towns along the coast and moved inland as disease, dispossession, and war made interior tribes more pliable.
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The English sought the surrender of Indian peoples to the government of Christ and his earthly ambassadors, and there was no greater symbol of acquiescence than the neat arrangement of Native American men, women, and children in English churches and schools.

In 1662 John Winthrop Jr. sent the English chemist Robert Boyle a plan for turning Indians into wage laborers to ease the financial burdens on the New England Company and pull the most populous nations into commercial alliances with the English. Twelve years later Winthrop informed Boyle that the
Pequot, Narragansett, and Mohegan were “beginning to fall to worke & to be much civilized & … to embrace the Gospell.” Boyle later bequeathed much of his estate to support the evangelization of Native Americans. His executors purchased Brafferton Manor in York, and distributed the rents in New England (to the New England Company and Harvard) and Virginia.
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In June 1675 Chief Metacomet, whom the English called King Philip, chose a definitive confrontation with the colonists over a slow reduction to vassalage. At least two Harvard-educated Indians served Metacomet, as translator and as strategist. The prominent presence of these Harvard Indians underscores the strategic deployment of academies in the Christian empires, the potential for Indians to use their education to resist colonialism, and Metacomet's predicament. The chief recounted a history of English abuses that rewarded the friendly posture of Native people upon the arrival of the first Christians with increasing aggression. He accused the English of using their might to displace Wampanoag leaders who defended their interests. Christians trespassed upon Indian lands to graze animals and hunt, cheated in trade, and stole land without repercussions. The courts and officials held Indians to account for minor violations of colonial law but the most respectable Indians could not gain justice against Englishmen, and no Englishman was subject to Wampanoag law. The Plymouth court empowered local selectmen to indenture any idle Indians, gave magistrates the authority to sell Native children out of the colony for property crimes, and assumed the right to regulate the movement and daily lives of all Indians in the neighborhood.
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The growth of the colonies, Indian population losses and military vulnerabilities, and the increasing economic dependence of indigenous communities on the English eroded Native sovereignty. Metacomet discovered that his translator, John Sassamon—who had attended Harvard under Eliot's largesse—had fraudulently transcribed a will to rob him of land. He accused Sassamon of betraying Wampanoag secrets. An Algonquian-speaking African captive who had escaped from the Wampanoag also alerted the English of Metacomet's plans. Sassamon had settled among the Wampanoag after expressing dissatisfaction with the English, acted as an interpreter and advisor, and served as a translator and witness for Metacomet's earlier land transactions. The English found the body of this “Christian that could read and write” in a lake. In retaliation, they tried three of Metacomet's lieutenants before a jury of twelve Englishman and six Indians. Earlier they humiliated Metacomet's brother Wamsutta, or King Alexander, who was ordered to the colony and berated. Wamsutta died upon returning from this meeting, and the Wampanoag suspected the English of poisoning him. The English then hanged Metacomet's men.
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The Wampanoag chief Metacomet, known in English
as King Philip, in an image by Paul Revere
SOURCE: Yale University Art Gallery

The last great contest for New England was cataclysmic. Despite the efforts of the colonial governments and the crown, Native nations had acquired guns by trading with the French to the north, the Dutch to the west, and in the black markets of the English colonies. As early as 1630 a royal decree attempted to block the trade in martial weapons. Plymouth banned selling, exchanging, or loaning guns to Indians, forbade the repair of guns belonging to Natives, and prohibited Indians from buying gunpowder. The General Court tried to regulate access to everything from liquor to horses, and routinely reminded colonists of the dangers of such trade. Although Connecticut banned the sale of powder and arms to Indians, the New Haven court called Richard Hubball to account in 1652 for selling gunpowder to hostile nations—a crime to which Hubball casually confessed. The States General allowed flintlocks only for Dutch residents of New Netherland and prescribed the death penalty to anyone who sold them to Indians. In 1639 the West India Company affirmed capital punishment for any New Netherland settlers, regardless of social status, who armed Indians, and it established rewards for informants. Those prohibitions failed utterly. Not only did Native nations trade for guns, but they demanded the more expensive flintlocks, which could be used in bad weather, and they often had them before Christian militiamen. King Philip's forces had ample supplies of guns and had mastered their use and upkeep.
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For Harvard, it was an existential war. The college had been struggling under the leadership of President Leonard Hoar, and his successor, Urian Oakes, inherited an “afflicted and almost destroyed University.” The colony was in armed struggle and the school was suffering. While the students were exempt from fighting, most of them had deserted the campus. “I humbly beseech Almighty God, the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that He may be pleased to shatter that very barbarity, whence ariseth our greatest peril of destruction,” President Oakes prayed during his 1675 commencement address, “that from the barbarians who impend
and expend our lives, His boundless loving kindness will deliver us sound and whole.”
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Decades later, Harvard president Benjamin Wadsworth went to the battlefield in Sudbury to place a stone at the site of his father's grave. In April 1676 Metacomet's allied forces had killed Captain Samuel Wadsworth and dozens of his men. Governor John Leverett guided Massachusetts Bay during King Philip's War, and in 1708 his grandson, of the same name, became the first lay president of Harvard, where he began the process of modernizing the curriculum. Another Harvard graduate, William Stoughton, whose father had participated in the massacre of the Pequot, assisted Governor Leverett. William Bradford, the son of the second Plymouth governor, was in the regiment that Metacomet outmaneuvered in Rhode Island. Major Simon Willard, a merchant, a fur trader, and a founder of Concord, had forty years experience in Indian wars when he joined the fight against Metacomet. His son, Samuel Willard, had graduated from Harvard in 1659 and later became a vice president of the college. Joseph Dudley, a 1665 graduate and the future royal governor of New England, battled the Narragansett. The Boston merchant and land speculator Captain Thomas Brattle had unsuccessfully negotiated with Metacomet before the war and led a company during the conflict. A son, of the same name, graduated from Harvard in 1676 and served twenty years as treasurer of the college. A second son, William, graduated in 1680.
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Several Harvard men fought King Philip's forces and died. One of Metacomet's earliest attacks resulted in the murder or imprisonment of more than a dozen relatives of the Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, class of 1652, including his wife, Mary Rowlandson, who authored a well-known captivity narrative. Gershom Bulkeley, a 1655 graduate, was surgeon to the English, Mohegan, and Pequot forces that pushed into Nipmuck territory, destroyed food supplies and forts, executed dozens of men, and took scores of hostages, mostly women and children. The Reverend Hope Atherton, who was in Bulkeley's Harvard class, accompanied Captain William Turner during his battle against the Indians at Montague. Atherton lost contact with his forces and suffered from hunger and
exposure. His health never recovered and he died the following year. John Rayner, another Harvard-trained minister, died of exposure. Captain Joshua Scottow commanded forces from Black Point, Maine, and his son Thomas, Harvard class of 1677, later served in Indian campaigns.
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In August 1676 troops under Captain Benjamin Church cornered Metacomet near Mount Hope, Rhode Island, where he was shot dead by an English-allied Indian soldier. “His Head was brought into Plymouth in great triumph,” reads the church record. The English dismembered Metacomet's body, mounted his head on a pole and paraded it around Plymouth, and sold his wife and son into slavery in Bermuda. Hundreds of Wampanoag, Narragansett, and their confederated peoples, particularly women and children, were traded to the Caribbean on ships that returned to the port towns of New England with enslaved Africans. Already decimated by disease and serial wars, the Indians suffered a defeat that erased thousands of years of history in New England. After the conflict, a French Protestant bragged that King Philip's War had ruined the Indians, “and consequently they are incapable of defending themselves.”
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King Philip's War intensified Puritan demands for the complete domination of Native peoples, for which they had a ready blueprint in African slavery. The Boston merchant Nathaniel Saltonstall, Harvard class of 1659 and a prominent benefactor of the college, sent extensive updates on the war to a friend in England. In his second communication, Saltonstall attached an account of the concurrent discovery of a massive slave conspiracy in Barbados. The close economic ties between New England and Barbados gave rise to mutual sympathies. The report from Barbados also commented upon the northern Indian war. “Our Fellow-subjects in New-England have the 28th of the same Month, tasted of the same Cup, and was very hard put to it this last Summer by one King Philip an Indian King, who hath Revolted without Cause,” one G. W. wrote from the island.
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In September 1680 the General Court transferred a portion of Metacomet's lands to the proprietors of a new township and Congregationalist church at Mount Hope Neck, which was renamed
Bristol for the English city. The town leveraged its future on its proximity to Newport and Providence, Rhode Island, the leading slaving ports in the northern colonies, and honored the city that was to be for decades the chief slaving port of England. Bristol's founding generation was filled with slave owners, including John Saffin, who soon became infamous when Judge Samuel Sewall exposed him for violating an agreement to free an enslaved black man. Following the war, New Englanders confined most of the remaining Indians to a string of reservations in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. They also redefined unfree Indians, like Africans, to a category of property equivalent to livestock.
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