Pequot War
The Pequot War was a war between New England settlers and the Pequot Indians in 1637 over control of southern New England. The New Englanders won a complete victory, and the war taught them how to fight Indians.
The first major war in New England was the Pequot War of 1637. The basic issue was whether the colonists would control the territory or whether the Indians would have complete autonomy. Plymouth Colony had deeds that claimed they had purchased the land from the Pequot Indians. Other Indians in the area, especially the Narragansett and Mohegan Indians were the historic enemies of the Pequot, and joined the colonists. Cave (2004) points to a misunderstanding. In 1634 Pequotes murdered Captain John Stone, which led to Puritan distrust of the Pequots and became part of the justification for the Puritan "punitive" war. The Pequots were avenging the Dutch execution of the Pequot sachem Tatobem, and they incorrectly thought Stone was Dutch. There is also a strong possibility that the confession to the murder by the Pequots was not really such, but a misinterpretation by the Massachusetts authorities. The casus bellum was the Pequot murder of John Oldham. In April, 1637, a raid on a Pequot village led to a retaliatory raid by Pequot on the town of Wethersfield, Connecticut, killing some 30 colonists.
Finally in 1637 the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay and New Haven, banded together, coordinated their militia, formed an alliance with some tribes, and put John Mason and John Underhill in charge. working with Indian allies, they launched a major attack on the chief Pequot village near modern Mystic, Connecticut. They burned it to the ground, killing 300+ Pequots. The survivors were divided up as prisoners and slaves for the Indian allies, and the remainder sold as slaves to the West Indies. A remnant of Pequots survived and in the late 20th century they acquired federal recognition and built one of the largest casinos in the world in Connecticut.
Hirsch (1988) examines the interaction of Puritan and Indian military cultures in 17th-century New England, focusing on the Pequot War. Both the English and Indians acted within their own military traditions in their relations, and with ethnocentric naivete expected the other to share such values. Thus they were both surprised when the other acted according to an alien code. This misunderstanding of motivations and actions led to the Pequot War, the first Indian-white war in New England, and inspired the slaughter that ended it. The total warfare of King Philip's War, alien to both previous traditions, demonstrated the new synthesis of military practices that had come from this clash of cultures.
The colonists learned they needed Indian allies to fight Indians, that winter warfare gave them the advantage for the Indians had to defend their food supply, and that ambushes had to be avoided.
Karr (1998) traces 17th-century Indian-white relations in Massachusetts, arguing that the violence of the Pequot War of 1637, especially the burning of the Pequot village at Mystic and the slaughter of survivors by Puritan troops, may best be explained by the two groups' alien cultures and inability "to agree on the limits of permissible conduct." Because the English Puritans ignored and denied the Pequots' legitimacy and sovereignty, and were confident of their ultimate victory, they fought the Indians not as they would a European state that shared a code of combat reserved for Christian and external foes but as an illegitimate internal enemy that did not deserve quarter or the protections of a legitimate enemy. Since the warring parties failed "to establish reciprocity" in their fighting during the Pequot War, future Puritan-Indian conflicts, such as King Philip's War, would also be extremely savage and ferocious. Wood (1998) argues that although the merciless treatment of the Pequots might appear to contradict European principles of just warfare, the Puritans justified their actions with references to past Pequot aggression and the religious wars described in the Bible. Puritan theology construed native religion as devil worship or witchcraft. For the Puritans, annihilation of the Pequots was necessary to save God's chosen people from Satan's agents.
Katz (1991) reassesses historians who describe the war as an exercise in genocide in reaction to rather limited threats to English settlements from the Pequots. Such a view, founded on presentist notions of outrage and moral sanctimony, obfuscates the fact that native tribes fought on the side of the English, both sides were mutually responsible for the onset of hostilities, and the colonists were rightfully concerned with threats to their survival. Historians holding to the thesis of genocide overinterpret and occasionally misinterpret their sources to advance their argument.
Bibliography
- Cave, Alfred A. The Pequot War, U of Massachusetts Press, 1996, 222pp online edition
- Laurence M. Hauptman, "The Pequot War and Its Legacies," in The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an Indian Nation, ed. Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry (1990)
- Hirsch, Adam J. "The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-century New England." Journal of American History 1988 74(4): 1187-1212. Issn: 0021-8723 Fulltext in Jstor and Ebsco
- Karr, Ronald Dale. "'Why Should You Be So Furious': the Violence of the Pequot War." Journal of American History 1998 85(3): 876-909. Issn: 0021-8723 Fulltext: in Jstor and Ebsco
- Katz, Steven T. "The Pequot War Reconsidered." New England Quarterly 1991 64(2): 206-224. Issn: 0028-4866 Fulltext: in JSTOR
- Vaughan, Alden T. New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (1965), pp. 93-154
- Vaughan, Alden T. "Pequots and Puritans: The Causes of the War of 1637," William and Mary Quarterly, 21 (1964): 256-69. in JSTOR
- Wood, Timothy L. "Worlds Apart: Puritan Perceptions of the Native American During the Pequot War." Rhode Island History 1998 56(3): 62-75. Issn: 0035-4619