27. Joint Action in New England: The Pequot War

It was characteristic of the New England colonies that their first exercise in united action came in a joint slaughter of Indians; specifically, the Pequot War of 1636–37. The Pequots, who were the dominant tribe in the Connecticut area, had had difficulty with the Dutch in Connecticut and were therefore eager at first to welcome the English colonists. Unfortunately, Lt. William Holmes, commanding the first English settlement— the Plymouth expedition to Windsor—started off on the wrong foot; in late 1633 he purchased the land from dissident sachems whom he had brought back with him, and who had been expelled by the Pequots. Another unfortunate incident was the murder by the Pequots of a drunken Virginian sea captain named Stone, in the summer of 1633, in the mistaken belief that he was Dutch. Yet, the following year, the Pequot grand sachem Sassacus made with Massachusetts Bay a treaty that amounted to surrender to white wishes: the English were to be allowed to settle in Connecticut. The murderers of Stone were also to be surrendered to the English, but the latter thoughtfully made no demands for enforcement of this provision.

This peaceful state of affairs was disrupted by the murder of a prominent New England trader. In 1636, John Oldham was killed by the Block Island Indians on Block Island in the Atlantic Ocean east of Long Island. Now there were several things that characterized white treatment of the Indians in North America: (1) Indian guilt was always treated as collective rather than individual and punishment was never limited to the actual individual criminals; (2) the punishment was enormously greater than the original crime; (3) no careful distinctions were made between Indian tribes, the collective guilt being extended beyond the specific tribe involved; and (4) surprise attacks were used extensively to slaughter men, women, and children of the tribe. All these characteristics marked the white reaction to the murder of Oldham. In the first place, immediately after the death of Oldham, a party of whites under John Gallop shot at and rammed the unarmed Indian crew that had committed the crime, until all but four of the Indians were drowned. Of the four, two surrendered and one of them was promptly thrown overboard by Gallop.

But this swift punishment of the actual criminals was of course thought insufficient. Governor Vane of Massachusetts Bay quickly outfitted the tough John Endecott with an armed troop to slaughter more Block Island Indians. Now the Block Islanders had nothing to do with the Pequots. But somehow even the relatively liberal Vane concluded a priori that the Pequots must be harboring some of the murderers and he ordered Endecott to include the Pequots in the rigors of collective “punishment.” Specifically, Endecott was instructed to massacre every male Indian on Block Island whether guilty or innocent of the crime, and to kidnap all the women and children—in short, to depopulate Block Island of native Indians. He also instructed to demand from them a thousand fathoms of wampum and to seize a few Pequot children as hostages for their good behavior.

Endecott found that he could not catch the Block Island Indians, but he partially compensated by burning all their crops and wigwams and by destroying their property. Returning from the island, he could not persuade the supposedly ferocious Pequots to fight, but he nevertheless managed to kill some of them and to burn many Pequot crops and wigwams.

The Pequots, understandably rather bitter at this undeserved plunder, urged the Narragansett Indians, the leading tribe in Rhode Island, to join with them in warring against the white invaders. The Narragansetts, however, were very friendly with Roger Williams and, under his influence, refused the offer (for which friendship, as we have seen, the Narragansett grand sachem was later murdered by Massachusetts). The Pequot reprisal was to besiege Fort Saybrook, whose leader, Lt. Lyon Gardiner, had warned the exuberant Endecott in his plunder that “you come hither to raise these wasps about my ears, and then you will take wings and flee away.” Still, the situation was not yet out of hand, as only the military had been attacked, and not the settlers. But then, in the spring of 1637, amidst this explosive situation, the settlers at Wethersfield violated a solemn agreement they had made with a friendly chief named Sequin. When they bought the land from Sequin, they agreed to allow him to remain within the town limits. But now Wethersfield violated the agreement and expelled Sequin from the town. For the Pequots this was the last straw and they attacked Wethersfield and killed some of the inhabitants.

In the minds of the white men of that era, the deaths of a few white settlers were enough to justify the immediate extermination of an entire Indian nation—and it was precisely on such a course that the New England colonies now embarked. The first meeting of the General Court of Connecticut in May resolved upon an “offensive war against the Pequot,” and ninety men were conscripted from the three river towns under the command of Capt. John Mason (no relation to the Mason of New Hampshire). Joined by some dissident Indians, Mason launched a sneak attack on the Pequot camp, surrounding and burning the entire camp and slaughtering some six hundred Indians, the bulk of them old men, women, and children.

The remnant of the Pequot tribe, under Sassacus, attempted to flee westward, but they were now pursued by a combined force of Mason’s troops and over a hundred men from Massachusetts and Plymouth. Stragglers from the Pequots were slaughtered; of over a hundred Pequot men, women, and children hiding in a swamp, all the men were murdered in cold blood by the Massachusetts troop. Two Pequots, spared when they promised to take the whites to Sassacus, were murdered when they failed to do so. The Pequot women were all either turned over to the ungracious hands of the dissident Indians, or sold into slavery in Massachusetts. Finally, the remainder of the Pequots were trapped in a swamp near the site of Fairfield. The men were wiped out and the women sold into slavery, in which, not making successful slaves, they died soon after. Roger Williams’ pleas to Massachusetts for mercy for the Pequot prisoners were unheeded—despite his great service in keeping the Narragansetts out of the war. As for Sassacus, he managed to escape across the Hudson, but there the Mohawks—one of the Iroquois tribes allied to the Dutch and English—killed him and sent his scalp back to Boston as a token of their friendship with the English. The extermination of the Pequot people had been successfully accomplished.