46. King Philip's War

Since the massacre of the Pequots in 1637, there had been no open warfare between whites and Indians in New England. The expansion of the white settlers encroached seriously on ancient Indian lands, hunting grounds, and fisheries. Generally, the land was sold voluntarily by the Indians, but, as previously noted, the Indians had no firm concept of private property in land, as landed property was held communally and inalienably by the tribe. The Indians therefore regarded the purchases as a form of lease and thus could not help being hostile to the whites’ clearing the forests for agricultural purposes. More justifiable was the Indian resentment at the white government’s arrogant insistence on imposing white colonial laws and sovereignty over the Indians. Indians were hauled into white courts to settle disputes (even all-Indian disputes), and for failing to pay tribute and to obey such rigorous white laws—obviously incomprehensible to the Indians—as observing the Sabbath, and not blaspheming. Blasphemy, in fact, was punishable by death. And particularly significant was the New Englanders’ penchant for confiscating Indian land as punishment for Indian infractions. Furthermore, the Narragansett Indians, who had been induced by Roger Williams to remain friendly during the Pequot War, were continually threatened by the Atherton Company’s pressure for their lands. The murder of the Narragansett chief Miantonomo had, moreover, gone unavenged, because the Mohegan chief Uncas, who had done the deed with the connivance of Massachusetts Bay, remained under white protection. In addition, the Mohegans, Shawutucks, and Cowesits, Indians in alliance with the whites, were protected by the white governments though they repeatedly pillaged and murdered the Narragansett and Nipmuc Indians of southern New England.

In 1660 the venerable Indian chief Massasoit died. As chief of the Wampanoags of western Plymouth, on the eastern shores of Narragansett Bay, Massasoit had saved the original Pilgrims from starvation, and had sheltered Roger Williams in his lonely trek to Narragansett Bay. He was now succeeded by his elder son, Wamsutta, or Alexander. At this point, Plymouth began a series of outrageous harassments of the Wampanoags, who had by this time been driven into the Mt. Hope Peninsula, on Narragansett Bay, now the site of Bristol, Rhode Island. On mere rumor, and with no real evidence, Plymouth ordered Alexander into the General Court in 1662 to defend himself against the absurdly vague charge of plotting mischief. Having successfully defended himself against this accusation, Alexander unfortunately died, giving rise to suspicion among some Indians that he had been poisoned by the whites. Shortly afterward, Alexander’s successor, his brother Metacom (or Philip), was similarly hauled into court to defend himself against similar rumor-based charges. He too was found innocent.

In 1671 vague rumors about Philip’s unfriendliness toward the whites were again heard, and at this time the Plymouth magistrates wanted to adopt the hard-line policy of striking hard and destroying the Wampanoags. The other colonies held Plymouth back, however, and persuaded the colony to agree to a meeting in April of Philip and several leading Massachusetts citizens, as well as Plymouth officials, at Taunton. Philip, incidentally, insisted that Roger Williams be present as guarantee of fair treatment, and this request was granted.

At Taunton the Plymouth authorities made the arrogant demand that the Wampanoags render themselves defenseless by surrendering all their arms to Plymouth—and this despite the fact that no evidence against Philip was ever revealed. Seventy guns were surrendered. In addition to this humiliation, Philip and several sachems were again forced to appear in September, and gratuitously subjected to the insulting warning that he must “amend his ways if he expected peace; and that, if he went on in his refractory way, he must expect to smart for it.” The Indians again submitted and consented to pay a yearly tribute of five wolves’ heads to the colony.

Three years later, the harassment by Plymouth of the Wampanoags came to a climax. Causamon, a Christian or “praying” Indian, who had once been employed by Philip as a private secretary, now informed Plymouth of suspicious goings-on and possible conspiracies of some kind at Mt. Hope. Once again, Plymouth proposed to haul Philip into General Court to answer privately disclosed rumors against him. This time Philip heard of the proceedings, and in March 1675 came of his own accord to the court to defend himself. The authorities admitted they had no evidence of Philip’s guilt, but were displeased that not all the Wampanoags’ arms had been surrendered. They again harried Philip with the warning that if they heard any further rumors (even unproven ones), they would insist on confiscating all of the Wampanoags’ arms. Shortly after Philip left Plymouth, the informer Causamon was found murdered. Before a jury composed of whites and Indians, three Wampanoags were tried, convicted, and executed for the murder, albeit on the flimsy evidence of only one Indian eyewitness. The execution was carried out despite Roger Williams’ warning of the untrustworthiness of such Indian testimony. Here was the final straw in the accumulation of humiliations and provocations heaped upon Philip, capped by a further warning from Plymouth that Philip send away many Indians of other tribes who had now come to Mt. Hope.

The provocations had gone far enough. But five eminent Quakers, leaders of Rhode Island, headed by the deputy governor John Easton, now tried to persuade Philip, in a final peace conference, to agree to impartial arbitration. Philip was willing to arbitrate, but was also convinced that the other colonies would never agree. A few days later, on June 20, the Wampanoags retaliated for the execution with a raid on the neighboring town of Swansea, burning a couple of houses. In a few days, the raids on Swansea escalated into a few killings. King Philip’s War had now begun. A joint force from Plymouth and Boston now captured Mt. Hope, but the Indians managed to escape from the peninsula.

Philip proceeded to burn and ravage several Plymouth towns: Dartmouth, Middleborough, and Taunton. In the middle of July the war took a more ominous turn. The Nipmuc Indians in Massachusetts entered the war and ravaged the Massachusetts towns of Menlen and Brookfield; they successfully ambushed an armed troop sent for a peace parley. All-out war now commenced. Town after town was devastated. The northern Connecticut Valley towns of Northfield and Deerfield in Massachusetts had to be abandoned. The temporarily reactivated New England Confederation met on September 9 and decided on a united and intense war effort. The three colonies agreed to contribute 1,000 armed men to the united force, and a quota was assigned to each colony: Massachusetts would supply 527 men; Connecticut, 315; and Plymouth, which had started it all, 158. Military conscription reached every male between sixteen and sixty. Massachusetts decreed death for any refusal to serve, and Connecticut prohibited the emigration of any eligible person. The following spring Massachusetts also forced its citizens into a farm-labor draft; officials were authorized “to impress men for the... carrying on of the husbandry of such persons as were called off from the same into the service, who had not sufficient help of their own left at home to manage the same.” Any labor conscript who failed to report was fined, and if this failure was “accompanied with refractoriness... or contempt upon authority,” then the malefactor was liable to the death penalty. All men driven from their homes by the Indians were to be conscripted automatically for military duty in the places of their refuge. All trade with the Indians, not on government account, was forbidden on penalty of confiscation of all the trader’s property. And, finally, no person in Massachusetts was to leave the town of his residence without getting the permission of the local military committee. It would not be surprising if some of the more reflective citizens of Massachusetts began to wonder who their enemy was, the Indians or their own government.

The New England Confederation, in the summer of 1675, faced the question: Should it limit the war to its existing confines, or should it use the war as a point d’appui for the virtual extermination of the Indians of New England? Bearing in mind the usual white attitude toward the Indians, we are not surprised that New England chose the latter alternative. The particular problem was the land-rich Narragansetts, by far the most powerful of the New England Indians. Despite harassment, the traditionally friendly Narragansetts showed no sign of joining Philip’s antiwhite crusade. And even the almost fanatically pro-Puritan historian of New England, John Palfrey, admits that the confederation found not one scintilla of evidence of any sort of conspiracy between Philip and the other warring Indian tribes, let alone the peaceful Narragansetts.

Provocation against the Narragansetts had been particularly virulent in early 1675. The son of Uncas, the white-protected Mohegan chieftain, murdered a relative of the Narragansett chief Canonchet. Yet the whites refused to take any action to punish the murderers. They refused, as well, to take the case to an impartial justice, and to permit any armed action against Uncas—thereby closing every door of redress to the Narragansetts. In July 1675, soon after Philip launched his attack, the confederation commissioners of Massachusetts and Connecticut sent a strong military force to negotiate a new treaty of friendship with the Narragansetts. By mid-July the Narragansetts had signed a treaty, agreeing not to permit Wampanoag invasion of their land, and to turn over to the whites any Wampanoag refugees. By October it was learned that the Narragansetts had, instead, harbored some Indian refugees. Though a breach of the treaty, the Narragansett decision to give haven to refugees of war was hardly a casus belli: indeed, offering asylum to refugees from war is a simple humanitarian act. But the commissioners of the New England Confederation did not react this way. Instead, they delivered to the Narragansetts an ultimatum that if the refugees were not delivered up, the uttermost severities of war would be visited upon them. The confederation promptly raised another 1,000 men under the command of Plymouth’s Governor Winslow and marched in a war of aggression against the Narragansetts.

This action triggered a war hysteria that swept Boston and the rest of New England. Even some harmless “praying Indians” living near Boston were set upon and murdered by white mobs. The highly respected Daniel Gookin, who was friend and superintendent of the Christian Indians, was told that it would not be safe for him to appear on the streets of Boston. In a final flurry, Massachusetts again persecuted the Quakers. Some Puritans disseminated the notion that the Indian war was God’s punishment of New England for relaxing its persecution of the “idolatrous Quakers.” Other Puritans, characteristically, theorized that God was punishing New England for the new fashions in wigs and fancy hairdos.

Winslow’s march into the Narrangansett Country was made without the consent, and against the will, of the government of Rhode Island. Hence the invasion was a flagrant violation of the Rhode Island charter. But the confederation was heedless of this fact, and heedless also of the devastation that this extension of the war to the Narragansetts would wreak on the Rhode Island settlements. In fact, the Rhode Island government proposed to take the whole dispute to arbitration, and the Narragansetts approved. Implacably hard-line Plymouth refused. The Winslow forces invaded Rhode Island and, by the typically white tactic against the Indians of surprise attack, on December 19 captured the main Narragansett fort at the later site of South Kingstown, Rhode Island. In this terrible “Swamp Fight,” about one thousand Indians were slaughtered, including some three hundred women and children. This was the turning point of the war, as it broke the great Narragansett power.

How had Rhode Island arrived at its peace policy? During the late 1650s and 1660s, the Quakers had made enormous strides in converting a colony already individualistic and libertarian in spirit. In particular, the Quakers were dominant in Newport. In 1672 the increasingly irascible Roger Williams had once more called his old enemy the litigious William Harris, into court. This time the charge was disloyalty and high treason for favoring Connecticut’s claims to the Narragansett lands. At the same time the administration of Governor Benedict Arnold, in league with Williams, passed rigorous measures to suppress agitation against high taxes, largely by the Quakers, and to confiscate the property of disloyal “plotters” against the state. It was clear that Roger Williams had been outstripped as a champion of liberty and freedom of advocacy. The result of Arnold’s despotic act was an alliance between two opposition groups, the Quakers and the Harris forces, which jointly came to power in the Rhode Island elections of May 1672.

The world’s first Quaker government, with Nicholas Easton, now a Quaker, as governor, now embarked on a highly liberal course. Harris was immediately released from prison, and made an assistant of the province. The laws suppressing anti-tax agitators were quickly repealed as an invasion of the “liberties of the people.” And, in an act of August 13, 1673, conscientious objectors were now exempted completely from military service for the first time in America.

The act declared that since Rhode Island already refused to force Quakers or other conscientious objectors to take an oath, “how much more ought such men forbear to compel their equal neighbors, against their consciences, to train to fight and to kill!” In detail this historic act provided: “That no person... that is, or hereafter shall be persuaded in his conscience that he cannot or ought not to train, to learn to fight, nor to war, nor to kill any person or persons, shall at any time be compelled against his judgment and conscience to train, arm, or fight, to kill any person or persons by reason of, or at the command of, any officer of this colony, civil nor military, nor by reason of any by-laws here passed or formerly enacted....”

During the Anglo-Dutch War, however, the Easton administration seriously compromised pacifist Quaker principles, by instructing the magistrates and town military officers to build the colony’s defenses. And after the Dutch recaptured New York, the Quaker-dominated assembly gave authority to the governor to appoint military commanders, and to provide military training for the citizens.

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.

Governor Andros, however, was not the man for friendly conferences when violence could be employed. He denounced Connecticut’s stubbornness as virtual rebellion. With King Philip’s War now breaking out in June, Andros informed the Connecticut Council on July 7 that he was dispatching posthaste his troops to the Connecticut River. Professor Dunn aptly summarizes the Connecticut reaction: “Whether Andros’ soldiers were to be used against the Indians or against the Connecticut government was unclear, but the Council members could guess. They sent a company of militia commanded by Capt. Thomas Bull to Saybrook with the instructions to protect the seacoast from ‘the approach of an enemy’— either redskinned or redcoated.”* Andros managed to reach Fort Saybrook first, but there he was confronted with armed and glowering local militiamen. Andros had expected to find the militia away fighting Indians and to seize the undefended fort. Instead, the militiamen were preparing their cannons. In this crisis the Connecticut General Assembly stood fast. It directed Captain Bull to tell Andros to go to Mt. Hope if he really wanted to fight Indians, but to resist if he tried to land his troops. Andros, his bluff called, contented himself with reading aloud a proclamation of the duke’s charter. The Connecticut force countered with a proclamation of its own, protesting Andros’ illegal actions, and calling Andros a disturber of the public peace. Feebly protesting this as slander, Andros sailed back home. Connecticut had successfully resisted the loss of its self-government by the imperialist seizure of Andros and New York. Interestingly enough, the Hartford government’s reaction was to commend Bull and the other officers, but to complain that they acted too mildly. Andros’ reading of the duke’s charter, they said, should have been drowned out by the drums of Connecticut troops.

*Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 183.